Author: admin

seriously, so many invitations to partake in your events.
so many brilliant colleagues roped into feeling complicit with these weird parties.

we’re in edinburgh now, proud to be the noted voice of dissent at Selfconscious’s canada hub. we’re doing a DECLARATION. friend and fellow fiesty rabble-rouser michael rubenfeld contacted us about an available slot for Indigenous content, and we quickly suggested a handful of wonderful, relatively affordable shows colleagues have made. rubenfeld listened patiently (he’s good at listening and asking questions) and then asked us “what about you guys? i was thinking you could come and for the month and just do whatever you want.”

at Onishka Prodcutions’ Indigenous Contemporary Scene, June 2017.
Centaur Theatre, Thursday, June 8 at 8 pm and Friday, June 9 at 8 p.m.
This production was made possible through support of Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal’s Residency program.

“Healing always comes with wounds. They are inextricably linked. At its best, art exposes the latter to further the former and in doing so can mark a path for reconciliation. Reckoning from ARTICLE 11 does just this. As powerful, poignant and vital a performance as you will see this year, at a time when we need it most. ” Jesse Wente, Ojibwe. Film critic and Director of Film Programmes at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

When the truth has been incinerated and reconciliation seems impossible, there is Reckoning.

Created and produced by A11 founding artists Tara Beagan and Andy Moro, Reckoning is an ode to the irreconcilable. A triptych in sound, movement, video and text, Reckoning is an incendiary theatrical presentation of three separate experiences with Indian Residential Schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the fallout that has already reverberated across the country.

Created and produced by A11 founding artists Tara Beagan and Andy Moro, Reckoning is an ode to the irreconcilable.

A triptych in sound, movement, video and text, Reckoning is an incendiary theatrical presentation of three separate experiences with Indian Residential Schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the fallout that has already reverberated across the country.

This work introduced the Indigenous theatrical community to Tara Beagan (and vice versa) when Native Earth premiered it in 2005.
The play was intended to have a Western Canada debut in Alberta, in 2012, but was re-scheduled for early 2013. The possibility of production had to be pulled from the Albertan company, due to differing ideas of professionalism. Beagan was deeply saddened at missing the chance to have this play run in its home province, but was comforted to know she was sparing artists from mistreatment. She was also leavened by the interest of the four current producing companies and the artistic and professional integrity with which they operate.

Strong advocates of Indigenous direction and design on Indigenous plays, Beagan and Moro are honoured to be on the quadri-co-pro D&I team. The duo who helm ARTICLE 11 were and are continually humbled by the dedication of the emerging Indigenous theatre artists in the cast (Roseanne Supernault, who many know from her film and TV work, Dakota Hebert, and Garret C. Smith), as well as the vet (Sharon Bakker) who guides them gently along their way.

The Play
1975, Lethbridge Alberta. When the Monoghan sisters lose their parents in a car accident, Deirdre remains as the sole caregiver to her older sister, Isabelle. Just as Deirdre is poised to enter university and begin exploring, for the first time, her own future and independence, she must choose how much of her own life she will sacrifice for the love of Isabelle. Deirdre is barely staying afloat under the strain of this reality when hope arrives in the form of gorgeous vacuum cleaner salesman Freddie Seven Horses. Both sisters find in Freddie a new world of unexplored emotions and ideas, where Freddie is a port in a storm.

“I don’t remember growing up. Not really. Do people remember that? Growing? Only when it hurts, maybe.”

Synopsis

Spring, 1979. A young girl is mere days away from celebrating her birthday. Her dad can’t keep the secret of her gift any longer, so proudly presents her with a new bike – well… new to her. Birthday girl and bike take their debut trip along the nearest paved road. Failing to return for dinner, a makeshift search party finds only the bike, tossed into some bushes at the side of the road. For years, family and friends imagine their missing girl into adulthood. This play is told from the perspective of the missing girl, her own memory returning for the telling, only in shards.

This story is a fictionalized account inspired by all too many true stories. Through the perspective of one lone girl, it is the tragedy of a peoples systemically abused by an uncaring government, made intimate. This play is a plea that it never happens again.

Native Earth’s featured production is the much-acclaimed In Spirit (formerly Quilchena,) directed by former Artistic Director Tara Beagan. Created by Beagan and the original creative team, In Spirit is a fiercely haunting work. Production Designer Andy Moro returns with a fearsome videoscape along with the sound and lighting he conceived of in the SummerWorks production where “he seared our eyes and ears.” (NOW Magazine, ’07 Top Ten Theatre Artists of the year.) Actor Sera-Lys McArthur (Where the Blood Mixes, CBC’s Arctic Air, Hard Core Logo II) joins Beagan and Moro as the sole performer, rounding out the all-Indigenous creative team. The work will debut at the Talking Stick Festival before returning to the Aki Studio Theatre and Rutas Panamericanas.